Paecilomyces variotii is an imperfect fungus which is widely distributed throughout nature. Paecilomyces variotii forms asexual spores including double cell walls called chlamydospores in its life cycle. The chlamydospores of Paecilomyces variotii are known to have very high resistance to stress, and to live and proliferate even under conditions for sterilizing general fungi by heat and a reagent, resulting in growth of mold. Therefore, Paecilomyces variotii is regarded as a harmful fungus in food industry and toiletry industry. Accordingly, in establishment of antiseptic and antifungal systems, detection and identification of Paecilomyces variotii is considered to be very important.
Detection and identification of Paecilomyces variotii is performed mainly by morphological classification through culture. In this method, it is necessary to continue the culture until morphological characters appear, and hence it takes a long period of time (at least 14 days) to perform the method. Moreover, the morphological identification requires a very high level of professionalism, and the identification results may vary depending on judges and have a problem in reliability. Therefore, it is required to establish a detection and identification method which solves the problems of rapidness and reliability.
As a method of rapidly and reliably detecting a fungus, an amplification method which targets a specific nucleotide sequence of a gene (such as the PCR method or the LAMP method) is known (see, for example, JP-T-11-505728 (“JP-T” means searched and published International patent publication), JP-A-2006-61152 (“JP-A” means unexamined published Japanese patent application), JP-A-2006-304763 and JP-A-2007-174903). However, a gene region specific to Paecilomyces variotii has not been clarified. Therefore, such method has a problem in that it is difficult to detect Paecilomyces variotii specifically and rapidly.